New, inspirational names in order for Johnson High, other new Huntsville City Schools (Opinion by Superintendent Casey Wardynski)

The names we select for our new schools must speak to the times in which our students live and the challenges we know they must dominate.

On Sept. 25 Huntsville City Schools completed its purchase of a 50-acre site for the construction of a new high school and junior high school in north Huntsville.

With this transaction, our school system took a major step forward in its three-year construction program to modernize and improve education across Huntsville. Over the coming 35 months, Huntsville will invest over $60 million at this site to build modern facilities with greatly improved spaces designed to enhance 21st century learning, program adjacencies to foster development of strong learning cultures focused on college and career readiness, and features to enhance student safety and supervision.

When delivered, these two new schools will replace over 600,000 square feet of old schools that are two-to-four times too large for the student populations that live in their attendance zones.

Through appropriate sizing and use of new technologies, delivery of these schools will allow Huntsville to shift more than $1.5 million per year from heating, cooling, lighting, maintaining, securing, and cleaning replaced schools to providing enhanced programs at the new schools.

These educational programs will include a new law and public safety academy, sports medicine academy, cyber security academy, and robotics and industrial maintenance academy.

As designs for the new junior high and high school take shape, teachers and leaders in the attendance zone to be served by these schools are already at work strengthening instructional programs to accelerate student growth and creating strong school cultures focused upon high expectations for student achievement.

Indeed, before we identified the site for the new schools, Huntsville City Schools had begun the process of reversing trends and ending practices that had earned the “failing school” label for many old schools in the attendance zone that will be served by our new north junior high and high school.

Now, as our construction plans take shape, citizens have stepped forward in accordance with school system policies to assist Huntsville City Schools in identifying names for our schools that speak to the important role education plays in preparing children to become successful adults.

Since the new schools will serve attendance zones previously served by several schools, new names are in order.

Also, since we live in a new age, an age that is separated by two generations from the time in which schools to be replaced were named and opened, new thinking with regard to sorts of names we should consider is also in order.

We live in an age of rapid technological change in which a strong primary and secondary education is the foundation for life-long learning that will ensure our students enjoy life-long employability in high wage fields.

We live in an age in which the demographic makeup of our new schools upon their opening will be far different from the student populations that first entered the schools which we will soon retire.

The names we select for our new schools must speak to the times in which our students live and the challenges we know they must dominate. The names we select must also speak to aspirations that we know will drive our students forward to high levels of achievement and that speak to the unique role our city has played and continues to play in the growth of our country.

As I listen to the recommendations and insights to be offered by the citizen groups identifying candidate names for our new schools, I will be particularly attentive to rationales that speak to the aspirations of our children and how proposed school names address these aspirations.

I will be listening for names that can inspire students to become life-long learners, and help students recognize the key role education can play in building their futures.

I will also be attentive to facts that cannot be ignored. In the cases of schools to be replaced, the majority of our students and parents have already spoken. A majority of the families in the attendance areas to be served by our two new schools have sought enrollment in schools outside their zone that bear names that are associated with educational achievement.

Indeed, I will be mindful that even while some public persons who now speak to retain the name of a school which will retire in 2016, their progeny have long since sought and obtained transfers to schools outside their attendance area.

As I listen to recommendations and form my recommendation to the Board of Education, I will keep in mind that school names are important signals of the excellence in education that our students and community require and deserve.

I look forward to hearing the recommendations of the citizen groups working to bring forth names for our new junior high and high school in north Huntsville that will provide such a signal.

Casey Wardynski is superintendent of Huntsville City Schools.

For previous coverage of the controversy over renaming Johnson High School.

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